"Me," Who Cares?

For the past year five years, I have been working on a memoir and now re-reading it; who cares? I can't imagine a reader watching, and I don't even care. The fact that I just completed 54,000 words on the day I was born is... well, egotistical. To sit at my desk in front of a computer or two, for six hours a day, to focus on only me, and how "me' is so important to..." me" is really too much. Not to sound egotistical, I tried to write about people around me, that made "me" a better or exciting person. But after studying the facts, and looking at various photo albums, I concluded that "me" is not really that interesting.

The opening sentence to the memoir, "The world changed when Tosh was born on August 25, 1954, " strikes me a bit strongly. But it took me around five years, and I know this because I kept a detailed journal focusing on my feelings. Eventually, I got to the following sentence. Once I got there, I found myself that I couldn't stop writing. Page after page came by, like an Orson Welles montage. But alas, the writing and subject were and are shit.

I stopped writing and listened to a lot of Robert Wyatt's records. His voice conveys a comfort zone that no other singer can offer me. Often I like to watch silent Ernst Lubitsch films with Wyatt as their soundtrack. It shouldn't work, but it works for me. I concluded that this memoir only works as a piece of literature. But as an art object or art piece?

The manuscript as of now, which focuses on the day I was born, runs to 104 typed pages. I decided to print the manuscript, put each page in a decorative picture frame (you can get it at the local drug store cheaply), and sign each paper. The work can only be sold separately, and I will charge $150 for each framed page. This will come to around $15,600, but I need clarification on the expenses of typing paper and the frames. It may be a tad more expensive.

The project is already a pain in the neck because I have to go to various CVS outlets to purchase 104 picture frames. For a minute, I should get custom-made frames. But the work inside those frames is shit, so why buy something more expensive for shit?

I finally gathered all the cheap shitty frames and spent a day and a half putting each page of the manuscript within these frames. I decided the best thing to do was have an exhibition at my house, so I had to remove works by Marcel Broodthaers, Jackson Pollock, and Alice Neel off my walls to replace them with my crap. 

To decorate the living room where the exhibition took place, I added flower arrangements by Hiroshi Teshigahara around the room. He is my local floweriest but often a pain in the ass. With him, it is all about the aesthetic, and sometimes it's a bit much for me.

I didn't want to waste time with riffraff, so I put a sign on my front door that admission is $150, and with that, you get a free piece of artwork from yours truly. Which, of course, is a page of my manuscript, not nicely framed. Nevertheless, business was terrible, and now I have this inventory on my wall that reminds me consistently of my failure.